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Monthly Archives: January 2011

Gapminder has posted an interesting chart using world development indicators from the World Bank. I thought it would be a good exercise to recreate this chart using R and ggplot2. While playing with the data, not log transforming GDP provides some interesting, and perhaps different, interpretation. The R script and graphics are below. Google Gadget Version library(ggplot2)

Okay, so this isn't ecology related at all, but I like exploring data sets. So here goes...Propublica has some awesome data sets available at their website: http://www.propublica.org/tools/I played around with their data set on Recovery.gov (see hyperl...

In my last sab-R-metrics post, I went over some basics of calling data and creating vectors or new data from those. Here, I want to extend that to full subsets of data and go on to use some of the basic functions in R so that we can begin plotting in the next tutorial.Before I begin, I...

New in nerdery this week, it’s now a bit easier to install the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences that I put together (based on lots of great work by Phil Hagelberg and, more recently, Eric Schulte). In the past, the fact that AucTeX was both necessary and had to be compiled locally made

Following the idea posted on James Cheshire's blog (here), I have tried to play a little bit with R and Google. And it works ! Consider for instance life expectancy at birth (that can be found - and downloaded - here). Using the following code, it ...

In Lost, Hugo “Hurley”
Reyes played the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 at the lottery, and
ended up winning the $114-million jackpot. And over the ensuing weeks,
everyone around him seems to suffer increasingly bad luck: Hurley’s
grandfathe...

The table function in R is very useful, especially when working with survey data. Often you may have Likert scales for levels of agreement or satisfaction. table() quickly gives the distribution of answers, which can then be used for (bar)plots.However...

When using Windows Vista / 7, Windows' User Account Control can be annoying. When is R going to be Windows 7 ready, asking for elevated priviliges only when needed? I guess the problem lies in the structure of packages.Running Rgui.exe "as Administrato...

This post describes the reasons for my transition to Vim.Brief BackgroundOver the years I've used a lot of different text editors on Windows.In general, I've used whatever text editor came with a program.When I started using R, I moved from Rgui throug...